ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR! #2. WENDIGO (dir.
Larry Fessenden) There is a cutaway to a cooing baby late in the
myth-laced horror drama Wendigo that shatters any hope we have of escaping the
film's emotional grip. Larry Fessenden is M. Night Shyamalan with a rawer, more
personal vision, cloaking as he does piercing societal critique in genre
conventions, and that proverbial spoonful of sugar tastes very good indeed.
Wendigo is among not only the year's most moving films, but also its most
visually sumptuous. --Bill Chambers
FILMFREAK.NET

A wonderfully suggestive creepiness permeates every corner of Larry Fessenden's
"Wendigo," a mostly superb bit of modern horror from the writer-director-editor
previously responsible for the Frankenstein story "No Telling" and the urban
vampire pic "Habit." Together, the films comprise an accomplished, unofficial
trilogy of urban paranoia, alienation and metaphysical dread. And while
"Wendigo" lacks the near-epic introspection and longing of "Habit," it is
in many ways Fessenden's most accomplished and accessible pic to date, making
strong use of his fine cast and production values in a thoroughly intriguing
exploration of our communal need for myths and their need for us. Pic, which
should rivet audiences attracted to the more philosophical elements of "The
Blair Witch Project" and "The Sixth Sense," could build strong word-of-mouth
if not misrepresented as a conventional monster movie.

Like the best, early work of George Romero, Fessenden is experimenting
here with the overlapping of real and invented horrors, subtly introducing
supernatural elements into a pragmatic setting. He gives us a family, traveling
from Manhattan into snowbound upstate New York for a weekend's vacation.
And he gives us a father, George (brilliantly played by Jake Weber), who
is a violent tempest of internalized stress and unexpressed rage, inextricably
chained to his job as an in-demand advertising photog.

The strain on the relationship with his wife, Kim (Patricia Clarkson) is
evident, and doesn't go unnoticed by their young son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan,
also excellent).

When George, distracted, runs over a deer in the middle of an iced-over
country road, he quickly earns the ire of Otis (John Speredakos), a member
of the small hunting party that had been pursuing the now-injured buck.
Otis becomes enraged and George, despite pretending otherwise, trembles
in his wake.

Once the family has settled at a friend's country home, the evident rural
quiet and isolation immediately begin to erode. Otis (who lives on a neighboring
property) somehow seems to be at the root of it all.

On its surface, "Wendigo" is easily classifiable as a supernatural horror
pic with a withdrawn, solemn child and unstable father at its core. It is
a scenario purposely meant to recall "The Shining" and "Poltergeist," but
it is only the beginning of what amounts to a questioning of our very conception
of horror and fantasy myths. Covering the film with a panoply of textual
and subtextual references to icons of cinematic horror, Greek legends and
ethnic folklore, Fessenden rips a schism between existential non-belief
and more diagrammatic ways of explaining the world. And in the most lyrical
scene of the richly textured screenplay, George explains to Miles that all
storytelling is but a way of giving meaning to the images and events around
us, of distilling virtue from so much chaos and confusion.

The Wendigo, a Native American, shape-shifting spirit capable of taking
on any form and combination of elements, is represented as the sculpture
of a half-man, half-deer, given to Miles by a mysterious Indian shopkeeper.
But really, the Wendigo is a continuation of the suggestion throughout the
film of modern man at a crossroads -- of all things primal at odds with
all things developed, and of civilized man at odds with his own inner, animalistic
self.

In pic's second half, Fessenden further blurs the distinction between reality
and myth, spiraling us into a harrowing deluge of panic and fright.

The beauty of Fessenden's technique is that "Wendigo" can be interpreted
in any number of ways, and the film is no less enthralling taken as an intricate
windup machine of mechanized thrills, as an inquisitive piece of psychological
reasoning, or as a deeply perceptive study of a family breaking apart.

In fact, if there's a major disappointment to "Wendigo," it's only that
by the time pic reaches its breathless conclusion, you're left waiting for
another act. Pic's ending, while perfectly suited to the mythological storytelling
being invoked (and sure to provide the fuel for lengthy post-screening debate)
comes so abruptly, and on such an adrenaline-racing high, things could continue
for at least another reel..

Given the emphasis the film places on the relationship between father and
son, the relationship between mother and son, which only begins to take
hold in the climactic final moments, craves deeper attention. Fessenden's
films have been so perceptive on matters of the male ego, one can only hope
he might turn a similar attention to the female psyche.

Eight-year-old Miles (Malcolm in the Middle's
Erik Per Sullivan) is on a trip to the wilds of upstate New York with his
urban-professional parents (Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber), when a freak
accident and a threatening encounter with a local (John Speredakos) awaken
an angry Indian spirit. Writer-director Larry Fessenden third in a series
of re-created features begins with a nod to the original WOLFMAN (and a
childhood spent adoring it) before shifting into a darkly beautiful, genuinely
scary movie about elemental beastliness that lives in even the most civilized
among us. Set against Stephen Beatrice's multilayered production design
and some deftly measured performances, Fessenden's keen feel for tension
and frightful release finds its most refined expression yet.

The independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden has set himself a challenging
project: to approach the themes and thrills of the classic American horror
movies through a determinedly modern approach, as if John Cassavetes had
been working for Universal in the early 30's.

In his 1991 "No Telling," Mr. Fessenden transposed the Frankenstein story
to rural New York; his 1997 "Habit" found vampires in the East Village.
In his new movie, "Wendigo," the Wolfman legend becomes the basis for a
story of family tension, class warfare and ecological revenge, set again
in a snowy, isolated upstate village.

The McClaren family - Kim (Patricia Clarkson), a psychotherapist; George
(Jake Weber), a frustrated commercial photographer; and Miles (Erik Per
Sullivan), their 8-year-old son - are driving up from Manhattan to spend
a winter weekend at a farmhouse borrowed from a city colleague. Just as
they approach the property in their tidy little Volvo wagon, a wounded stag
leaps out of the woods and smashes into their car.

The animal is followed by three hunters, evidently drunk and quite angry
that George has inadvertently stolen the prize they have been pursuing for
hours. Otis (John Speredakos), the most unruly of the locals, finishes off
the dying animal with a shot from his revolver. George protests, but Otis
pushes on, humiliating the city man in front of his wife (who fumes but
does nothing) and son (who stares impassively at this first demonstration
of his father's vulnerability).

With this opening sequence, Mr. Fessenden introduces several ideas. There
is the contrast between the civilized, soft urban male and his macho country
counterparts. There is the tension created within the family by George's
humiliation. And there is the sudden appearance of nature, red in tooth
and claw, and ready to rise up against the human violators, in ways that
don't fit into the city folks' Disneyfied notions of a natural landscape
of sweetness and sentimentality.

Dramatically, "Wendigo," which opens today at the Film Forum, doesn't do
quite as good a job as "Habit" did of putting these ideas and archetypes
into play. The script often seems to lose focus in side issues and protracted
dialogue scenes. But the core emotions are strong and solid, which serves
"Wendigo" well as it moves into the supernatural realm.

The Wendigo of the title is a creature of Indian mythology, an amalgam
of animal, vegetable and human components that resembles a very angry tree.
A mysterious Indian in the local drugstore offers little Miles a Wendigo
figure carved from an antler, giving the boy implicit control over its destructive
powers. And when the moment comes, provoked by another hostile act by Otis,
Miles is imaginatively able to conjure up the creature and send it out to
do his not-quite-conscious will.

As in his previous films, Mr. Fessenden carefully blurs the line between
psychology and the supernatural, suggesting that each is strongly implicated
in the other. The rampaging Wendigo may be a manifestation of Miles's incipient
Oedipal rage, but at the same time it is a force embedded in nature and
history. Such abstract notions may put off fans of the genre in its most
elemental, slice- and-dice form. But for those in search of something different,
"Wendigo" is a genuinely bone-chilling tale.

Spending a get-away weekend in a borrowed farmhouse, a city couple has
an increasingly tense feud with a demented deer hunter, and their eight-year-old
son copes with his anxieties through imaginative encounters with a rage-filled
phantasm heÍs learned about from an enigmatic Native American sage. FessendenÍs
latest horror yarn is a spectacularly smart and scary voyage into the uncanny
realm where hard realities, mind-spinning myths, and hallucinatory visions
blur into one another at the speed of thought. Produced on a modest budget,
it sports moody cinematography, razor-sharp editing, and real-as-life acting
that make most of HollywoodÍs big-budget fakery look laughably tame. If
you needed proof that understated chills are far more frightening than bursts
of bombastic gore, look no further than this spine-shivering example of
indie ingenuity.

The nuclear family comes under another sort of terror attack in Wendigo,
a nifty supernatural chiller by independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden. A
Manhattan professional couple, commercial photographer George (Jake Weber)
and psychotherapist Kim (Patricia Clarkson), along with their eight-year-old
son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan), are en route to a winter weekend at a Catskill
farmhouse when their Volvo station wagon hits a buck on an icy back road
and a subsequent encounter with a hostile hunter (John Sperednakis) turns
their getaway into a nightmare.

From the first scene on, Fessenden orchestrates the tensions within the
isolated family-George's barely suppressed anger, Kim's resentment, the
child's fear of the aggression he senses around him. George frequently teases
Miles by playing monster, and before turning in for the night, the boy has
his mother check under the bed and inside the closets. (Sullivan's tight,
wizened face eerily expresses his parents' middle-aged anxieties.) The old
dark house may be rattling in the wind and riddled with mysterious bullet
holes, but the locus of terror is the surrounding forest. Like The Blair
Witch Project, Wendigo evokes the primal fear of the continent's white settlers-it's
named for the malevolent spirit that haunts the woods in Indian legends.

This cannibal creature was used to grisly effect a few years ago in Antonia
Bird's gross-out, anti-militarist western Ravenous, but Fessenden's Wendigo
is a movie of suggestion and foreboding, most of it filtered through Miles's
spooked consciousness. The backstory is provided when the family drives
to town for provisions (at a general store well stocked with toy guns and
hunting paraphernalia) and a mysterious Native American informs the boy
about the shape-shifting wendigo. To add to the historical guilt, George
learns that a nearby town was flooded to make a reservoir for New York City.
Fessenden finds a landscape of agonized-looking wooden Indians and totem
poles, but it's the cold emptiness of the Catskills that seems most uncanny-a
vacuum into which the beleaguered family (and the audience) can project
their fantasies.

Despite occasional intimations of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wendigo
is more atmospheric than splatterfying. As the story turns violent, Miles's
hallucinations come to the fore. Among other things, we learn that Svankmajer's
Little Otik may also have been a wendigo: Grounded in Fessenden's handheld
camera, stuttering montage rhythms, and time-lapse photography, the engagingly
primitive animated special effects contribute to a mood that's sustained
through the surprisingly somber conclusion.

Larry Fessenden is a filmmaker with an uncanny gift for the creation of
unsettling moods, capable, among other things, of bringing out the spookiness
and menace inherent in a bleak winter landscape. He makes unusual, almost
handmade art horror films, of which the eerie "Wendigo" is the latest example.

"Wendigo" is the third film (the excellent Manhattan vampire film "Habit"
was the first, "No Telling" the second) in what the writer-director-editor
calls "a trilogy of revisionist horror movies" that take a fresh, unencumbered
look at some of the classic fright film themes.

In this, Fessenden is an interesting successor to producer Val Lewton,
whose much-admired low-key 1940s horror films such as "I Walked With a Zombie,"
"The Body Snatcher" and "Bedlam" have been enormously influential and admired.
And, reminiscent of recent non-American horror films such as Alejandro Amenabar's
"The Others" and Guillermo del Toro's "The Devil's Backbone," Fessenden's
films depend on atmosphere more than shock to unnerve us. "Wendigo" is named
after a terrifying creature out of Native American mythology that has been
utilized by everyone from poet Ogden Nash to the creators of "The X-Files"
and Marvel Comics. As described in the film by a mysterious tribal elder,
this half-man, half-deer shape-shifter is "always hungry, never satisfied.
There are spirits to be feared because they are angry. He who hears the
cry of the Wendigo is never seen again." If that sentence sends a bit of
a chill down your back, you'll appreciate this kind of filmmaking.

Certainly psychoanalyst Kim McClaren ("High Art's" Patricia Clarkson),
her photographer-husband, George (Jake Weber), and their 8-year-old son,
Miles (the self-possessed Erik Per Sullivan), are not thinking of dreaded
mythological beasts as they drive through upstate New York on the way to
a vacation weekend at a friend's borrowed country house.

Then, suddenly, a large deer bounds out of the woods and is hit by their
car. Almost immediately, a trio of ragged local hunters emerges in the animal's
wake, and their leader, the in-your-face Otis (John Speredakos) uses a pistol
to kill the buck in front of an unnerved Miles. This causes a disturbing
confrontation between the family and the hunters, which gets even creepier
when it turns out Otis lives very close to their destination farmhouse.

Though they try, it's hard for the family to have a relaxing time after
what has happened, with Kim still angry and George, the kind of guy who
has a deer on his sweater, not in his rifle sights, looking especially overmatched.
The incident has the strongest effect, however, on young Miles. He's a worried,
susceptible child, prone to checking closets for dangerous creatures and
in fact visited by ghostly apparitions when the lights go down.

Even in daylight, however, strange incidents begin to happen both around
the house and in the town. Is this a case of excitable city folks being
unable to cope with the solitude of rural life, or is something strange,
something truly sinister, about to go down?

Working with cinematographer Terry Stacey and having the benefit of a wonderfully
eerie score by composer Michelle DiBucci, Fessenden is the right director
to capture the nuances of this sum-of-all-fears situation.

Making a virtue of necessity, Fessenden manages to use snow, light and
wind to create a potent, chilling dreamscape. He employs jagged, almost
experimental camerawork in the film's creature sections, which he says he
approached "as if I were embarking on an art installation."

Though "Wendigo" has weak spots, including an ending that is not as satisfying
as it might be, the film remains memorable despite its flaws. This is a
properly spooky film about the power of spirits to influence us whether
we believe in them or not.

Larry Fessenden's Wendigo plays like a chthonic rite: it's terrifying in
its brutal purity and delicious in its ability to pull domestic trauma into
the well of archetype where it festers. The film is a further examination
of what William Blake cajoles in his "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"--that
"men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast," and it justifies
itself beautifully in such a Romanticist discussion, in a Jungian explication,
and even in a socio-political and historical examination. Wendigo is an
extraordinarily thorny film, no question; that it manages to be so without
pretension, while providing an experience that is terrifying and gorgeous,
is a remarkable achievement. It's why we go to the cinema: to be fed through
the eye, the heart, the mind.

Kim and George (Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber) drive to a friend's home
in upstate New York with young son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) to spend a
winter's weekend away from the worries of their therapist/photographer lives.
On the way, their car strikes a buck chased into the road by a trio of hunters
(led by the deranged Otis (John Speredakos)); a tense exchange evolves through
the kind of country/city baiting perfected in John Boorman's Deliverance.
The tension of these opening scenes (and throughout) is simply extraordinary.
Even more impressive, however, is Fessenden's ability to mix the objective
with the subjective in the narrative, presenting his horror film as a very
literal expression of a child coming to terms with the ugliness of adulthood.
Miles first bears witness to cruelty and caprice, then appears to become
the arbiter of the kind of savage, allegorical justice that defines most
mythological maxims.

Wendigo can be viewed on a literal and a metaphorical level. One can take
the events of the film at face value or, more instructively, examine how
a child constructs his own sensual world. Watch Miles react to his parents'
anger and his father's uncomfortable teasing, how a picture book and a bedtime
story fuels his night frights, and a moment when Miles wakes from a dream,
pauses at the top of the stairs, and leaps across the open space above the
landing to get to his parents' bedroom. The level of humanism and observation
in this film is revelatory: it captures the fear so often forgotten in films
about the cult of childhood, and it presents a character set that is recognizable
and utterly convincing in its subtlety.

It's very possible that the entire third act of Wendigo is a projection
of Miles' imagination as it tries to incorporate real events with his interpretation
of them. In this way, Wendigo joins last year's crop of reality- and identity-testing
films--such modern existentialist masterpieces as Memento and Mulholland
Drive. By using the film medium to explore the ever-shifting internal landscapes
of faith and identity, Wendigo succeeds and satisfies in a way that few
films even think to attempt. It is a stunning character piece, a deeply
unsettling horror film, and a meticulously crafted clockwork as spare and
tight as a drum. Larry Fessenden's Wendigo, the concluding film of a thematically
connected trilogy including Habit and No Telling, is a horror film for smart
people and one of the best holdovers from last year.

(3 STARS) WENDIGO (R). A city couple hit a deer, and their upstate weekend
turns into an experiment in terror. Strongly atmospheric, intelligent and
just plain scary. With Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan,
John Speredakos, Christopher Wynkoop. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden.
1:31 (sex, violence, vulgarity). At Film Forum, 209W. Houston St., Manhattan.

CLASS WARFARE has been a bountiful subtext in this season's movies - "Gosford
Park" being the obvious example, but "In the Bedroom," "Monster's Ball"
and "The Count of Monte Cristo" all doing their particular riff on the socio-economic-
distinction blues.

Leave it to downtown-ist auteur Larry Fessenden, though, to incorporate
class conflict as the foundation of a horror movie - and making it the scariest
part of the piece.

Fessenden's "Habit" was perhaps the most intelligent and frightening of
a rash of modernist vampire films that sort of rose from the crypt of Indie
World in the mid-'90s, using the theme of the undead as a metaphor for drug
addiction and/or AIDS. "Wendigo" (which follows "No Telling" and is the
third in what Fessenden calls his "horror trilogy") is a bit more conventional,
using as it does a great deal of time- lapsed skies and hallucinogenic flashes
of the grotesque and gory.

But as they drive their Volvo - it had to be a Volvo - though the slate
gray dusk of a wintry upstate New York, Kim (Patricia Clarkson), George
(Jake Weber) and their timid son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan, of "Malcolm
in the Middle"), are about to run head- on into the beer-fueled resentment
of rural America, and find themselves aliens on their own planet.

What they do is hit a deer - a deer that's been tracked for 18 hours by
the belligerent Otis (John Speredakos) and his two slightly less venomous
pals, chased across the highway and into the front end of the family car.
George is rattled, both by the deer and by Otis' anger: The impact cracked
an antler, ruining the value of the deer, which Otis dispatches with a pistol
shot - thereby sending Kim into a rage, George's adrenaline into flowing
and Miles - poor Miles, wonderfully played by Sullivan - into something
close to catatonia.

Fessenden eventually winds up with a far more conventional story than this
opener implies it will be - the idea of George's manhood being rattled by
three guys with guns, and the subsequent weekend being colored by this unexpected
confrontation with his ultracivilized ego (he's a photographer), is great
stuff - made even better by the thoroughly desolate and accurate portrait
Fessenden creates of a specific kind of upstate milieu. Mythic spirituality
rears its ugly head - literally - via the title character, based on a Canadian
Indian myth (and not the Marvel Comics character, by the way), presumed
to be a kind of Druid-like god angered by crimes against nature. And, perhaps,
even crimes against people.

That "Wendigo" leaves fewer doors open than you expected it might is almost
a disappointment, although the film is a creepshow by any estimation - and,
regardless of what end of the Volvo-vs.-Smith & Wesson argument you happen
to be on, a provocative piece of entertainment.

Larry Fessenden (Habit) has made something of a mini-career out of making
brainy films in a horror-film mode. With Wendigo, he gets the balance just
right, delivering a film thats thought-provoking and endlessly creepy all
at once. Patricia Clarkson (High Art) and Jake Weber play an NYC couple
who, young son in tow, make their way up north for a weekend getaway, but
promptly find themselves confronted with a rural environment that wants
nothing to do with them. Playing off everything from The Shining to Deliverance,
Fessenden includes a vengeful hunter who may be stalking the family and
an angry American Indian spirit which may be out to either kill or protect
them.

...the theater filled up completely for the evenings second film, and programmer
Mitch Davis took the stage to enthusiastically introduce Larry Fessendens
WENDIGO. Having seen it now, I can understand Mitchs wild enthusiasm for
it. This is a smart, adult feature that stands head and shoulders above
most genre offerings in its naturalistic approach to its characters and
its subject matter, a supernatural STRAW DOGS that deserves a wide audience
when it is released in the US in February 2002.

The start of the film evokes the start of Kubrick's THE SHINING, with the
sight of a family in a car, driving through a snowy wilderness. Patricia
Clarkson and Jake Weber are Kim and George, and Erik Per Sullivan (Dewey
on MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE) is their son Miles. Hes seated in the back, lost
in his fantasy wrestling match between a pair of action figures, a Shogun
Warrior and the Wolf Man. Theres a dreamy, languid quality to these opening
moments, shattered when George runs into a deer that darts out into the
road in front of them. Its sudden, shocking, and the car is sent into a
skid that takes it off the road. George gets out of the car to investigate
and sees that the animal is still alive, still twitching. Before he can
decide what to do about it, three hunters with rifles come running up, and
a confrontation unfolds. One of the hunters, Otis (played with a nice sense
of restraint by John Speredakos) goes ballistic when he realizes the antler
on the buck is cracked. Kim, in turn, freaks out when Otis finishes the
deer off with a pistol not ten feet from their car, in plain view of Miles.
It's clear from the start that we're dealing with two radically different
world views here, and the collision causes instant friction.

It doesn't help that the house George and Kim are staying in is the house
Otis grew up in, a house that was sold out from under him by his sister.
He takes random shots at the house, and George and Kim find bullet holes
in windows, slugs buried in walls. He also spies on them at night while
they're making love. In this early movement, it would be easy to think this
is just another city folks versus the hicks film, but Fessenden is after
something deeper, something more universal than that. This isnt George or
Kims movie. Instead, we witness it through the eyes of Miles. This is one
of the best movies I've ever seen at capturing the way children interpret
the world around them, and that's due in large part to the simple, unadorned
work of Erik Per Sullivan. Hes a natural presence, and he never oversells
his big moments. He has a remarkable, easy chemistry with both actors playing
his parents, and by putting him at the center of the film, Fessenden frees
himself up to explore the way a shadow looks on a wall at night or the way
things from our days make their way into our dreams and our nightmares.

When the family takes a trip into town for some supplies, Miles has an
encounter in a store with an old Indian man who gives him a strange, handcarved
statue of a Wendigo, a vengeful spirit. "Just because people dont believe
in spirits anymore doesnt mean they arent there," he tells the boy, and
Miles begins to carry the totem with him everywhere. The threats to his
happiness are from inside the family as much as they are from outside, as
George wrestles with his role as a father, trying to understand his son
and genuinely listen to him. Its great work by Jake Weber, who looks like
the American Tim Roth to an almost spooky degree. Until now, I havent really
taken note of Weber, but this is the kind of work that proves an actor is
something special. Its not a flashy role, but Weber makes it memorable and
real. He and Clarkson are totally believable together, and their fights
are as honest as their happy moments. Theres weight and history to this
marriage, and Miles is the logical result, a kid born out of real love.

An afternoon of sledding kicks off the films final movement, and theres
both tragedy and horror in store for the family and for the locals, Otis
in particular. I was impressed by the way Fessenden refused to give any
easy answers about the spirit of vengeance in this film. Is it karma? Is
it something that Miles summons? Or is it simply dumb luck that touches
all of us at some point or another? The film is beautifully photographed,
and at no point does there appear to be any limitations on Fessendens imagination
due to budget. This is the kind of genre film that deserves real attention
when it is released next year, and I hope to bring you more news and interviews
regarding the film closer to its actual release.

This is Film Week, Public
Radio's program on movies and video. We're joined this week by film critics,
Henry Sheehan of the Orange County Register, Jean Oppenheimer of Screen
International, and animation authority, Charles Solomon. Our final theatrical
film of the week is, Wendigo. The film is set, is it in upstate New York,
Henry? It takes a Manhattan family out of the city?

HENRY SHEEHAN: Yes, it, kind of, I guess, what, ten or fifteen years ago,
we would have called, a yuppie couple, played by Jake Weber and Patricia
Clarkson, and their young boy, who's played by Erik Per Sullivan, who plays
the littlest kid on, Malcolm In The Middle. And . . .

LARRY MANTLE: Who's great in the T.V. show.

HENRY SHEEHAN: Yeah, and he's very good. And, he's actually the central
character in this movie. I mean, he's, everything revolves around him. And,
they're on their way, it's a dark, they're on a, first of all, I have to
say, this movie's directed by Larry Fessenden. And, he is, it's a pleasure
to watch this movie, because he is in complete control of what he's doing.
I mean, this is a, this guy is a film maker. I mean, this guy really knows
what he's doing. And, it opens on . . .

LARRY MANTLE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) make a friend with a big star, so that he
could -- (LAUGHTER)

HENRY SHEEHAN: (LAUGH) Yeah, yeah.

LARRY MANTLE: --get the general release movie this week.

HENRY SHEEHAN: This is his third horror film. He, the only, he made one
called, Habit, which I saw, and which was also very good. It takes place
among drug users in New York City. And, he's kind of like George Romero.
Not that his films are like that, but that he's chosen to work in a specific
geographic area. In this case, New York City, in New York state, and make
films his way. And, he makes, kind of, ghost stories, the old-fashioned
way. There's a lot of inference, you know, there aren't too many onscreen
monsters, or blood-letting, but it's really spooky. And, this starts off,
they're driving down a dark, lonely country highway, they're lost, and all
of a sudden a deer crosses the road, and they kill it. Okay, they hit it,
and kill it, which is bad enough, 'cause the car ends up in a snow bank.
Well, who shows up but three local hunters, with big rifles. And, one of
them is really mad because, not only has this couple, George, is the husband's
name, killed the deer they've been hunting for eighteen hours, but he's
broken one of the antlers, or points, which, you know, was going to look
really good on the wall of one of the hunters. And, the hunter's name is
Otis. And, here's part of the confrontation they have.

[VIDEO CLIP]

HENRY SHEEHAN: (CONTINUED) So, you know, right away, you know, no ghost,
but very scary. You know, are, you know, and you were with the city people.
I mean, you feel just as isolated, and as scared, of these, you know, country
folk as they are. And, then the movie proceeds, they go to this house they're
renting. And, this guy, Otis, turns out to live nearby. And, he always seems
to be around when spooky things are going on. And, then, the movie, kind
of, starts concentrating on the son, who goes into a store with his mother.
And, a mysterious stranger gives them a carving of an Indian spirit, called
a Wendigo, which is a soul leader that is always hungry, he says it lives
between earth and sky, and it's not angry, but it's always hungry, and it's
very fierce. And, I don't want to give too much away, but it's just, if
you like, it's just very spooky, it's very chilling, it's just very well
done. It's just a pleasure to see a horror movie that actually works, and
a film maker that really knows what he's doing.

LARRY MANTLE: So, this film gets, kind of, the arthouse treatment, an arthouse
release, and all the crummy horror films end up being released all around
the country on thousands of screens.

HENRY SHEEHAN: Yeah, I, yeah, I don't know why, because it's, you know,
the, those films are actually failures, because they depend on just, you
know, throwing gore up at the screen.

LARRY MANTLE: Yeah, they're gross-out, they're not scary.

HENRY SHEEHAN: Yeah. And, this is very low budget. I mean, there is a little,
you do see a little bit of a, kind of a monster thing. But, you know, then,
that's not really what makes it scary. It's the humans that make it scary.

"Wendigo" (priced for rental VHS, also available on DVD) follows an urban family unit - frustrated
commercial photographer George (Jake Weber), psychiatrist Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and young son
Miles (Erik Per Sullivan, of "Malcolm in the Middle" fame) - into upstate New York's bleakly eerie
wintry woods. Their intended long-weekend vacation turns ominous early when they encounter hostile
local hunter Otis (John Speredakos) and, later, an American Indian legend about a mysterious evil spirit,
the titular "Wendigo."

Since we experience most of the action through Miles' wide, impressionable eyes, we're not always sure
how much of what we're seeing springs from his febrile imagination, a technique director Fessenden
deftly employs to keep the viewer off balance throughout. Relying more on dark visual poetry than
cheap jolts, Mr. Fessenden succeeds in creating a disturbing mood of isolation and mounting dread, one
somewhat akin to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." The horror, and pathos, heat up in the film's final
reel, when Miles' fears take root in a shattering reality.

In his insightful feature-length DVD audio commentary, Mr. Fessenden candidly discusses the movie's
varied cinematic influences, ranging from "Psycho" to "Phantasm," and the triumphs and travails of
indie filmmaking. Other entertaining extras include a separate Fessenden interview, the
behind-the-scenes featurette "Searching for Wendigo," and the original theatrical trailer. Fans of "quiet"
horror won't want to miss this one.

...And if the (Los Angeles Film) festival was notable for anything, it
was for its flat refusal to produce a single film that might be considered
a real "discovery." Unless, that is, you count Larry Fessenden's ingenious
"Wendigo," which was advertised as a world premiere, despite having shown
in a slightly different cut at Slamdance in January. (The primary difference:
a few penultimate visual effects shots, tweaked by Fessenden.) No matter
-- in any version, "Wendigo" is a sublime evocation of modern man at a three-way
intersection of primal instinct, superstition and spirituality It's alternately
tender and menacing in a way that turns most "horror" films inside-out,
and it's smart enough about families to make "American Beauty" look like
"The Family Circus."

...Like Abel Ferrara before him, Fessenden reworks well-trod genre territory
to fit his own personal vision, and the results are always interesting.
His last two features, NO TELLING and HABIT, turned the hoary Frankenstein
and vampire legends inside out to offer smart, socially conscious scares
that dealt frankly with environmentalism and addiction. Here Fessenden uses
the figure of the shapeshifter to explore the legacy of American violence
and the great chain of displacement that began with Native American genocide
and continues with the exploitation of rural land by city dwellers. But
make no mistake: For all its moral concerns, the film is pretty scary. Rather
than going for cheap shocks, Fessenden uses an unsettling mix of montage,
time-lapse photography and animation to create an atmosphere of great, unknowable
menace that closely approximates the haunted spirit of Algeron Blackwood's
unforgettable tale "The Wendigo." These hills are indeed alive.

Wendigo explores the notion of childhood imagination as a force of vengeance
and puts forth a troubling question: What's more frightening, the monsters
that live in the wilderness or the ones that live in a child's imagination?

A cosmopolitan, New York family ­ George (Jake Weber), Kim (Patricia Clarkson)
and their son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) ­ are headed to a cabin in the
Catskills when they hit a deer. Not only does the family Volvo cheat nearby
deer hunters out of a kill shot, but it also damages their trophy. George
tries to smooth over the situation, but one of the hunters, Otis (John Speredakos),
already carries a deep and personal resentment of city folk. And he's not
one to let such a slight go unpunished.

Animosity builds between Otis and George, who's either too proud or too
untrusting to approach the local law with his complaints. Meanwhile, Miles
receives a carved statuette of a wendigo, a fierce mythical Native-American
spirit, from a mysterious old man at a thrift store. As tensions build in
and out of the family, the wendigo becomes an escape from ­ and later an
unlikely outlet for ­ Miles' fear, anger and feelings of helplessness.

Wendigo isn't yet another examination of the dysfunctional American family
gussied up as a horror movie. There's no doubt that Miles is loved by his
mother and occasionally inattentive father. One of the most poignant moments
comes when George and Miles walk through the snow-dusted woods on their
way to go sledding. George recites Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening." He and Miles then discuss the deer, its death and what
it is to grieve. It's a tender moment between them that foreshadows the
tragedy to follow.

Writer and director Larry Fessenden does an outstanding job of generating
an ominous atmosphere and summoning the primal fears that stem from isolation.
Unseen things may or may not linger behind the trees. Unexplained bullet
holes appear in the walls. Hillbillies lurk hither and yon. The woods haven't
been this creepy since The Blair Witch Project.

While there's plenty of fine grown-up talent on display, it's young Mr.
Sullivan, who's already established a reputation as a weird little kid on
TV's Malcolm in the Middle, who serves as the dramatic anchor. Miles is
often the center of Wendigo's key scenes, and the little guy does an excellent
job of mixing innocence with the brooding, darker side of childhood. Through
his performance, Wendigo makes the uncomfortable assertion that the overactive
imagination of a child not only conjures the things that go bump in the
night, but it also unleashes them upon the world.

"One of the best movies I've ever seen," was one viewer's comment after
today's world premiere screening of Wendigo, Larry Fesseden's new feature.
Slamdance has its first unqualified hit.

Wendigo, which screened tonight to a sellout crowd, succeeds on every level.
The opening scene, in which a New York City couple driving through rural
Vermont hits a deer with their car and winds up in a tense encounter with
the hunters pursuing the wounded animal, makes it clear that the audience
is in the hands of a masterful storyteller.

Fesseden's film seems at first to be an intelligent horror movie, then
steadily deepens into a tale of the universal human need to create a mythology
to explain the tragedies of life. In this instance, the mythological beast
is a half man/half deer spirit of the woods called the 'Wendigo', a naturally
benevolent force which responds angrily when human beings get out of line.

The cast is superb, including the lead actor Jake Weber, and the very young
Erik Per Sullivan (Malcolm in the Middle). "Erik really was an amazing treasure,"
said Fesseden, "and that's just what Michael Caine said about working on
The Cider House Rules with him. In some ways, despite his age, he was the
most professional actor on the set."

The redneck deer hunters who function as the film's human antagonists are
portrayed so well as to merit comparison with Deliverance.

At times the film seems to comment on its own style, but always in a subtle
way. For instance, there's a moment in which the main character tells his
son a Robert Frost poem, then mentions that "Frost had a way of making a
simple image seem deep." The film promptly does just that with shots of
the Vermont wilderness, including an image of a stream rushing behind a
gnarled tree stump, shot with a slow shutter that blurs the water into a
airy froth. The director hired a second unit specifically to work on this
lovely and surreal photography.

Larry Fesseden has delivered on the promise of his earlier festival hits
Habit and No Telling. He has proved himself to be a masterful writer, editor,
producer and director, with an accomplished story that will surely find
the wide audience it deserves.

An old friend took a weekend trip with me to Rhode Island, deep in the
woods where I grew up. When night fell, she became instantly terrified by
the silence, gripping my arm and asking me to go outside the house and check
whether there was anyone out on the lawn.

The imagination is a powerful tool, untrustworthy but also oddly protective.
When you're a child, sometimes it's all you have to shield you from the
hard, cold facts of reality. Eight-year-old Miles (Erik Per Sullivan, The
Cider House Rules) is our perceptive guide into the world of the unknown
during a long weekend trip to snowy Vermont. Real danger comes into his
path when his father, George (Jake Weber, The Cell), hits a deer, leading
to an apprehensive confrontation with angry backwoods hunters. These men
with guns want some retribution for losing their prize -- the antler has
been cracked. As Kim (Patricia Clarkson, The Pledge) tells her son not to
worry, we wonder whether writer-director Larry Fessenden is taking us into
unsettling Flannery O'Connor territory.

Wendigo is a slow, steady heartbeat of a horror film that emotionally keeps
us in that scary place where bad things can happen. When the family eventually
arrive at their cabin, threats linger discreetly under the surface. Walks
in the woods, downhill sledding, even a visit to the local village all carry
a nearly imperceptible sense of danger. When chopping wood, George turns
to Miles and asks, "Do you know how to use an axe?" Be careful, or you might
slip.

The thread of parental responsibility emerges as George and Kim struggle
to be attentive to Miles, dealing with their own issues as an affectionate
but occasionally disconcerted couple. Fessenden takes ample time to develop
the family unit, allowing tender scenes like a spelling game between father
and son ("Spell onomatopoeia!") to set up a relationship that becomes crucial
when his story takes a sharp turn into the uncanny.

At nearly the midpoint of this taut ninety-minute nightmare, relief is
found for Miles in the form of a chimerical monster he invents, based on
an overheard legend. The Wendigo is an elemental spirit that appears in
various guises, taking the shape of wind, trees, or a hungry deer-man with
sharp antlers that roams the wilderness. All we can know for sure is that
it can fly at you like a sudden storm without warning from everywhere.

When one of the disenfranchised hunters (John Speredakos, in a richly nuanced
performance that avoids country bumpkin typecasting) starts lurking around
the property looking for trouble, Wendigo transforms into a fever dream
collage of frightening images. Miles channels his mystical creation as an
instrument of revenge against the forces which might rise up against the
family. Traumatic events come full circle in the eerily poetic finale.

Fessenden has built an impressive body of work with a trio of creepy low-budget
horror titles. His eco-Frankenstein fable No Telling gave way to the sensual
tapestry of dread found in his East Village vampire romance, Habit (one
of the finest genre films of the '90s, something my editor would take me
to task for, but judge for yourself). Completing the trilogy is Wendigo,
ostensibly his "werewolf" movie. The first image is Miles smashing together
two dolls, one of them the wolfman and the other a robot. Read the allegory
as you will.

Beautifully lensed by the inimitable Terry Stacey (who found more benevolent
sides of nature in Tom Gilroy's Spring Forward), Wendigo achieves a lyrical
quality that comes close to the fabric of dreams. The peculiar stop-motion
tracking shots through wilderness blur into a mosaic of haunting textures,
complemented by the hard folk beats of Michelle DiBucci's score. Credit
should also be extended to the surreal Wendigo designs (created by Fessenden,
supervised by Tim Considine), hand-crafted effects that could never have
been achieved through the limitations of computer generated imagery.

The greatest magic trick Fessenden pulls out of his hat is the stunning
performance by Erik Per Sullivan, blessed with a face that conveys so much
while seeming to do so little. There's something both old and young in his
features, possessed with the bright-eyed intelligence of, well, maybe a
young Larry Fessenden. Wendigo was inspired by a story told by the filmmaker's
first grade teacher that scared Young Larry. Hey, thanks a lot, Lar -- you
scared the shit out of me, too.

Human behavior can be disconcerting, even cruel. We grow afraid of the
thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, so stories are created as
metaphors or reflections to help us deal with it. Sometimes, humor can be
cathartic, laughing at our own humiliation or pain, but Fessenden chooses
to take us to a darker realm. Wendigo is a mirror of our psyche, the place
we're otherwise too afraid to go.

The difference between a lousy horror movie and a first-rate one is often
a matter of style.

Plot and characters that seem corny in a horror flick with no style can
totally creep you out if the filmmaker knows his stuff.

Larry Fessenden is credited as the writer, director and editor of Wendigo,
and it's that last credit that may be most telling. Mixing fast-motion,
slow-motion and supercharged jump-cut techniques, Fessenden (Habit, No Telling)
sets a chilling tone of anticipation that keeps you inching forward, a scene
at a time, until you're on the edge of your seat.

The premise is fairly straightforward.

A sophisticated New York couple and their 8-year-old son are driving upstate
to spend a weekend at a friend's country farmhouse. They hit a deer, angering
a dangerously weird hunter who'd had it in his sights. Later, the boy finds
a doll that represents the half-man, half-deer Native American spirit called
the Wendigo.

Just about everything in this film works. The plot is well thought-out
and the dialogue sounds realistic. It's touching and true-to-life the way
the parents (Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber), at every awful turn, try
to shield their son from the worst.

The acting is top-notch, including that of young Erik Per Sullivan (Malcolm
in the Middle), who, as the boy, seems to have been cast for his big, anxious
eyes and satellite-dish ears.

Finally, however, the movie comes down to its exciting style, and the creepy
mood that that style makes possible.

If a horror movie isn't creepy, it isn't much of anything. And if it is
creepy, it doesn't need to be much of anything else.

a real shocker in its own right, is Wendigo (June 13, 9:45 p.m.), the latest
project from independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden. There's a touch of The
Shining and more than a little Deliverance in this taut little psychodrama
about a snowbound, vacationing family being traumatized by psycho rednecks
out in the middle of nowhere. Is it this year's Blair Witch Project? No.
Are some of the effects a touch too artsy while others just come off as
overly cheesy? Well, honestly, yes. But that doesn't take away from the
notion that Wendigo is still one of the more frightening and disturbing
movies I've seen in quite some time.

The mainstream horror genre could learn something from this austere indie
about an urban family finding horror in the country. Rated:ÊÊ ÊÊÊ Things
get creepy for the McLaren family on the drive to a friend's rural farmhouse:
The family car hits a deer, which upset some local hunters, and soon they
all face supernatural retribution.

With its tale of an urban family in a stark winter setting and facing ticked-off
locals in plaid flannel, "Wendigo" could easily have been a mere blend of
"Deliverance" and "The Shining." Instead, it's a beautiful and haunting
examination of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the mundane
horrors of the world. Writer-director Larry Fessenden paints an ultrabelievable
portrait of the moments in a young family's daily life, and his script is
bolstered by excellent performances that give the characters heft and hint
at their history together. "Wendigo" practically hums with foreboding anxiety
and tension, but it's also as subtle as the quietly sinister wind that accompanies
almost every shot.

The spirit of Stephen King wafts over "Wendigo" like a chilling breeze
at your neck. The spooky backwoods New England locale, the damaged protagonist,
the narrow-eyed locals and the child whose night frights could be warning
visions are all familiar enough. But writer-director Larry Fessenden makes
them feel as fresh and creepy as a newly dug grave.

A Volvo wagon snakes up an icy country road. It's the beginning of a weekend
getaway at a friend's farmhouse for Manhattanites George (Jake Weber), Kim
(Patricia Clarkson), and their 8-year-old son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan).
They hit a buck and spin into a snowbank, where they're accosted by an angry
hunter, Otis (John Speredakos). The city people spoiled his trophy, cracking
the valuable antlers. George and Otis lock horns like battling stags in
front of Miles' spooked eyes. An atmosphere of tension and foreboding is
established swiftly and believably.

We get to know the characters one layer at a time. First, we register George's
tightly contained anger in his exchanges with Kim, his confrontation with
Otis and his monster-play with Miles. Little by little, Fessenden reveals
George's money worries and professional setbacks.

We discover that high-strung Kim is a therapist. It's both surprising and
logical. Who else would take on a fixer-upper like her husband?

We see much of the movie through Miles' experience, going back and forth
between our sympathy for his parents and our fear that they're doing more
damage to him than any woodland threat could ever do.

On a trip to town, Miles hears the legend of the wendigo, a vengeful spirit
said to haunt the region. His nightmares increase, but there's danger in
the daylight, too: bullet holes in windows and walls. Is the family being
threatened?

The uniformly strong cast lends credibility to the engrossing predicament.
Weber, an actor with an edgy, hostile presence, is perfectly cast as the
simmering father, and Speredakos has the glint of "Deliverance" menace in
his eye. Sullivan, the youngest brother on TV's "Malcolm in the Middle,"
proves he's a solid dramatic actor, giving Miles a heartbreaking look of
wide-eyed worry.

Fessenden makes a last-minute detour into horror-film territory that can
be read as hallucination. It's a risky maneuver that might spoil the film
for some viewers. By the time the misstep arrived, I was too impressed with
the film to complain. Missteps and all, Fessenden is a talent to watch.